Lyra
by i'm a happy potato
Summary: A murder mystery from a piece of coursework which i completed a while ago


**Chapter 1 - Lyra**

It was on a cold, wet morning that I walked down the empty road to the cemetery. The street could have been a ghost town. It was the twentieth anniversary of my father's death and I was making my way towards his grave.

The emerald grass was spongy underfoot and jewelled with the early morning rain. The sky was black, the day was dull and nothing could have made the day worse for me than it already was.

I could see the church straight in front of me and the cemetery lay behind that. The church had grey, stone walls and a long, black spire - a charred finger reaching toward the sky. On sunny days in the village the light shone through the stained glass of the church and projected a rainbow of colours on to the grey flagstones, like an artists palette. The sun, on days like this, would show the biblical scenes depicted in each window, enlarged onto the stone floor, but today I found it hard to imagine those scenes, and when I did manage to grasp those thoughts they brought me little comfort and kept slipping through my fingers like water. And the rain kept pouring down and I kept on walking.

I walked further towards the grey walls. The graves crept into my line of sight, overwhelming me. Hundreds and thousands of carved stones standing still on that area of flat land, stones of all colours and shapes swelled up out of the ground, like a forest of corpses ready to grab me at any moment. A carved log cross covered in stone ferns for a Captain in World War One, and a marble angel for a 2 year old who was accidentally drowned immediately caught my attention, just as they always did. Some headstones were not as intricately carved as others, but each stone was as important as all others in their own right. My father's grave was quite close to the back gates. It was made of brown marble and had gold lettering carved into the words "In loving memory of Marshall Lidiles, who fell asleep 24th September 1983". Green glass gravel lay within the borders of the grave and no weeds could be seen poking through, which was mainly due to the amount of times I came here and tended it.

I placed another bundle of fresh flowers onto the grave of my father and wept.

Now, I always get rather pensive when I'm close to my father but for some reason today I was more thoughtful than usual. Tears dropped onto my fathers ring and melded with the rain that seemed eternal. It could have been due to the special occasion that this was so, or maybe due to the fact that I simply seemed drawn there, but I felt a closeness to my father on that day like I never had since the last day he was alive. Today, vicious memories jerked and twisted at the pit of my stomach and the violent scenes of his death flashed through my memory.

Father sat in his chair whilst I catnapped on the black rug by the hearth. The dying embers of the night's fire plunged most of the room in shadows, my father's face semi-illuminated by the coals.

I closed my eyes for a second and tried to drift into a peaceful sleep, but this I found was impossible as in that second, like the calm before the storm, chaos ruled.

A shuffling caught my attention and woke me up completely. To a five-year-old, that small shuffling from the depths of the shadows seemed like six grown men stamping around in the gloom. To Marshall, my father, it must have seemed like a mouse, which is probably why he didn't even twitch. If he had realised what I could see through my innocent eyes maybe things would have turned out differently.

Suddenly four dark figures jumped out of the shadows of the open doorway. One tried to grab me. I screamed and ran, clambering under the table and towards the door. I narrowly escaped the smallest man's gaze by creeping into the darkest corner behind the armchair and curling up into a ball. They didn't really care to go after me then as they thought I would probably starve before anyone found me anyway. Two of the other men pulled my father out of his chair and held him tightly whilst another shouted something that I barely heard and didn't understand to him, put a needle to his arm and added a simple air bubble to his veins to slowly kill him without leaving too many clues around for the police to find at a later date. I didn't understand how they had killed him at the time, nor really truly understand that he was dead but I found out by the police when I had my first memory re appear almost 10 years ago.

After about two minutes he fell asleep on the hearth. As quickly as they had entered the figures left, leaving me, now an orphan to grow up alone.

Slowly not understanding what had just happened I pulled myself to the hearth where he lay and lifted the gold ring off his finger. Just like I always did. I lay close to him. just like I always did. Curled up and fell asleep, just like I always did.

The sound of a car horn hurled me out of my nightmare.

I have told the police before about such nightmares - but they never believe me. After all, who would believe someone's memory of something that happened twenty years ago? Especially when the five year old was the only eye witness to such horrific events. This was the clearest of my visions, I thought to myself as I peeled the glass out of my cheek where I had collapsed on to his grave. Should I tell the police? What would you have done in my situation? Well I decided that I would leave the police to let the case study of my fathers death stay in their "Unsolved murder" file for the time being. Whilst I carried on doing my line of work as a private investigator and try and find out a little more information for myself.

So I turned around from the graveyard and headed back into the civilisation of the town for some lunch and see if I could hook up with my colleague Hunter. Hunter was the closest thing to a friend I had. I had never had any real friends when I was younger as I had moved around the country. I also had no real family as I had grown up in the care homes, never able to stay in one place long enough. Before moving to _the_ home I had lived in a large house in the town centre with anything and everything I wanted provided by my father's important business, in the packing industry. There was only the two of us and he wanted the best for his little princess.

I have never met my mother who disappeared when I was six weeks old, at around the same time that my sister Rhiannon died. I have been told by one of my mothers friends who I managed to track down last year that Rhiannon mirrored my looks and quick wit but this is the only knowledge I have of her. It is thought that my mother went to live with my grandma Elsie over in Scotland but no one really knows.

The rain had stopped as I reached the main gates of the town but I had barely noticed because through years of living on the streets when I had ran away from the home I may have been chilled to the bone and completely drenched but my heart had been hardened by the weather of life long ago.

**If he had have moved twenty seconds earlier maybe he would still be around today to tell you this story himself. After all as I have learnt, the world is based on chance and fortune. I don't know maybe it was his turn to die and maybe God had a reason for this but all I can say is that to a five year old, who's father has just been murdered, it seems pretty unfair.**


End file.
